Seventies Long Island: The Whole Mishpocha

The first monograph by the New York-based photographer Meryl Meisler, published last year, included rambunctious scenes from Manhattan’s disco scene, taken in Meisler's club-hopping youth, alongside images of a crumbling, pre-gentrifying Bushwick, shot when Meisler was teaching art at a local public school, in the early eighties. But, before she began documenting urban life in New York, Meisler trained her eye outside of the city, photographing her own Jewish extended family on Long Island’s South Shore. In the early seventies, while home on winter break from studying illustration at the University of Wisconsin, Meisler began experimenting with deadpan self-portraiture, donning the Girl Scouts uniforms and the ballet and tap costumes of her childhood. Soon she was photographing her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—the whole mishpocha—finding loopy antics and exaggerated period detail in holiday gatherings and daily ritual. The result is a delightfully outlandish family photo album, and a capsule of seventies suburbia crackling with humor and mischief. In the Meisler-clan milieu, kitsch bedspreads match kitsch wallpaper, hairdressers blow chewing-gum bubbles the size of their clients’ bouffants, Hustler is the beach reading of choice, and everyone is a character or a ham.

In a new book, “Purgatory and Paradise: Sassy ’70s Suburbia and the City,” Meisler juxtaposes photos from her Long Island Series, as she calls it, with ones from her disco days. In the book’s introduction, the photographer Catherine Kirkpatrick writes that, when viewed side by side, “relatives crowded around a suburban dining table and clowns crowded into a tiny car don’t feel that very different. The demographics and settings shift; the human situation is the same.” But, despite her talent for capturing vastly disparate New York subcultures, Meisler has never worked as a professional photographer, assuming her style would be out of sync with commercial needs. “I see funny,” she said. “People come out funny.”

An exhibit of Meisler’s photographs opens at Black Box Gallery on Thursday as part of Bushwick Open Studios. Her book “Purgatory and Paradise: Sassy ’70s Suburbia and the City” is out this month from Bizarre Publishing.

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